Society got very excited about the invention of the car. From the 1950s onwards especially, governments around the world began huge road-building projects, bulldozing swathes of cities for huge multi-lane dual carriageways. This frenzy has subsided, and it’s largely clear how this ideological expansion reformed our cities for the worse. Highways are a crucial part of a nation’s infrastructure. Turnpikes—privately-funded and toll-financed roads—were, alongside the…

…but nobody is wrong in the same way as Bill Kristol. It’s very easy to be wrong about the past or the present: these are grim and murky places where nothing really makes sense. But Bill Kristol is wrong about the future, and this is an entirely different kind of wrongness.

Once What Happened is less read and talked about, now it’s just a book. If it has intrinsic merit, reader loyalty and word of mouth can keep it selling enough to make it worth keeping in print for years, decades, even centuries.
Is Hillary a contemporary Thucydides and this is the history of her own Peloponnesian war. Will she take out Pericles funeral oration and inject her own commentary on democracy and sacrifice. Perhaps this is Hillary’s discourses on Trump.

I have repeatedly blogged about discrimination, especially against women and non-whites in labour markets. On raw numbers we often see different outcomes between groups, and since we know that discrimination goes on, we often instinctively attribute these “gaps” to discrimination, as Tim Harford does in an otherwise nice piece here. But once we dial down and get more detail, the gaps often evaporate—the more employers…

Without a knowable historical record there can be no learning from past events, and no trust in previous knowledge. The result of the denial of history is the denial of learning, because no existing knowledge can be trusted. Denial of the capability of people to attain knowledge and understanding from existing sources of information is a component of nihilism. This leaves the future open to radicals and deconstructionists who have make a definitive break with the past.

Labor’s share of the national income is in freefall as a direct result of the optimization of financialization.

The Achilles Heel of our socio-economic system is the secular stagnation of earned income, i.e. wages and salaries. Stagnating wages undermine every aspect of our economy: consumption, credit, taxation and perhaps most importantly, the unspoken social contract that the benefits of productivity and increasing wealth will be distributed widely, if not fairly.

Credit reporting is the data that links surveillance, credit, democracy and national security questions. But, from the NSA to Facebook and down the corporate chain, we never have never figured out how to handle privacy and data, computerization and personal data has always been linked to the power to control citizens, not priv

Despite many qualities, the Archbishop of Canterbury speaks as though he is shamefully illinformed and lazy-minded about the global economy, making hasty, ill thought out assertions about how society is so horribly unjust, and that the poor are getting the roughest deal of an economy that needs to be distributed less unevenly. Here is the actual reality of what’s been happening, illustrated in Branco Milanovic’s…

Liberals read liberal columnists to be told liberal things, conservatives, conservative, feminists, feminist. All want to be assured that their vacuous and pernicious delusions are the bedrock of cosmic truth.

Truth disappeared so long ago in this witch-hunt that it is no longer even possible to define what the accusation is. Belief in “Russian hacking” of the US election has been elevated to a generic accusation of undefined wrongdoing, a vague malaise we are told is floating poisonously in the ether, but we are not allowed to analyse. What did the Russians actually do?

The e-commerce giant is the subject of a number of myths regarding its size and clout that mask the reality of its position compared with rivals like Wal-Mart Stores Inc and Costco Wholesale Corp – according to Charlie O’Shea, Moody’s vice president and lead retail analyst…

Estimates for the Amazon Prime membership base are also wildly inflated, O’Shea said, with some pundits betting the figure is as high as 85 million. Amazon itself has never provided a number, other than to say it is in the tens of millions.

…cash isn’t the only form of capital that can be drawn upon to generate agency: credit is almost as good as cash, if one can borrow the money at near-zero rates of interest. The intellectual/social capital implicit in entrepreneurial agency is not financial, but it empowers those who possess it in ways that cash or credit alone cannot.

What do all those people in the CIA, NSA and every other Get Smart agency do all day? Can’t almost the entire thing be cardboard boxed up and sent home.

Isn’t Facebook already doing ***almost*** all of whatever the Get Smart’s presumably do? Best of all, Facebook is profitable. They are doing all the splendid spying and meddling in political affairs, but add to that menace that they are also showing cute puppy videos and serving up ads.
The future is almost here…

University of Iowa Assistant Professor Jodi Linley is under fire for an article in a “peer-reviewed academic journal” in which she pledged to expose her students to “their own white ignorance.” She says that…

The American Civil Liberties Union is apologizing for featuring the picture of this child at part of is promotional campaign after outraged supporters said that the image rekindled fears of Charlottesville…

Every sports contest has people who are convinced, and occasionally convincing, that they predicted the outcome.

I am time stamping my predictions for McGregor v Mayweather. I’m not gonna give a whole analysis or the forensics of how I solved, or didn’t, this puzzle because it just doesn’t matter. Either something happens or it doesn’t.